Critics and Creators

5 Aug

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how people who criticize games ought to just “make their own games” that say what they believe games should say. There are innumerable problems with this statement, some of them practical and some ideological.

Practical first. Maybe I can’t make games. Maybe I don’t have access to the resources necessary to make a game. If my vision is AAA quality, I might not have the millions of dollars it would take to produce that vision, and to make an “indie” version might undercut the game’s purpose. Maybe I don’t have the time to learn the skills I would need to program or animate or write the things I would like to see in a game. Maybe I would love to make the game, but I just can’t, whether for financial or personal reasons.

But let’s assume for a second that my problem isn’t actually practical. Let’s assume that I do have access to these things, but that I simply don’t want to make a game. I’m not interested in making a game, in designing mechanics, in doing art and animation and programming. I just don’t want to.

That does not, I repeat, does not mean that I am not qualified to criticize existing games any more than Roger Ebert was not qualified to criticize films (he didn’t make them), Emily Nussbaum is not qualified to criticize television (she doesn’t make tv shows), or Harold Bloom is not qualified to criticize literature (he doesn’t write it – although to be fair, I kind of wish Harold Bloom didn’t criticize literature, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the right or the qualifications to do so). In fact,almost all critics of a thing do not make that thingfor a living.

Why is it, then, that we have this hangup about games that says “if you don’t like it, make your own”?

It’s the same source, I think, as the idiotic adage “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” (Don’t get me started on that one.) There is this sense among the masses that someone can only participate in something if they are a part of it – if they are an expert, a genius, a creator. Such an attitude is profoundly dangerous and, frankly, lazy.

The most important part of a participatory community is not the creator(s); the most important part of any community is its audience. The consumers. The watchers. The commenters. Shakespeare knew this. His audience also knew this. The role of an audience is not simply to passively absorb what they are shown or told. The role of an audience is to receive, to assess, and to judge the media they consume. They can judge with the spending or withholding of money, certainly, but they can also judge with their words.

That is the role of the critic. To be an active and engaged member of the audience who has passion for the focus of that community, be it games, film, television, literature, soccer, graphic novels, football, portraiture, figure skating, performance art, theater, dance, music… the list goes on. The critic stands in as a voice from the audience, which has many voices, some of them discordant, some harmonious. The critic’s purpose is not to create anew the genre which she or he criticizes; it is to help to shape that genre from the point of view of the audience.

The audience – and the audience’s criticism – is what shapes every artistic genre that has ever existed or will ever exist. In that sense, the critic’s voice has just as much power as the creator’s over the afterlife of a product – Ebert’s reviews have made and broken films. Of course, not all critics are or ever will be Ebert. But the collection of voices that are critical raise issues to prominence that need discussion – irrespective of the eventual outcome of that discussion.

All of this comes down to the fallacy that critics do what they do because they lack the capacity to create. It is not that critics cannot create any more than teachers cannot “do.” Teachers teach, a thing that must be “done” with finesse, skill, and dedication. Critics critique (or “criticize,” if you wish), which requires extensive knowledge of the genre, culture, history, and other criticism within that field.

So when I criticize a game, don’t tell me to go “make my own game.” I did not choose to become a game designer. I chose to become a critic, and my criticism is the way in which I choose to shape the genre that I, too, love.